Our Partners
The problems associated with an aging society transcend the boundaries of any specific discipline and play out across multiple biologic and societal domains ranging from individual cells, to organs and organ systems, to persons, to communities, to national and world economies. The six National Institute on Aging (NIA) Center programs address important topics in aging but typically from a specific disciplinary perspective. The Research Centers Collaborative Network (RCCN) initiates new cross-disciplinary collaborative networks that bring together key thought leaders from each of the six NIA center programs to align approaches across programs that will uncover synergies and insights that lead to novel collaborations. The RCCN will spur multi-disciplinary efforts in aging research across the centers through five complementary strategies: conferences, pilot programs, early career faculty education, web-based resource identification tools, and fundraising/proposal development.
The National Institute on Aging (NIA) IMbedded Pragmatic Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and AD-Related Dementias (AD/ADRD) Clinical Trials (IMPACT) Collaboratory was established in 2019 to meet the urgent public health need to deliver high quality, evidence-based care to people living with dementia (PLWD) and their caregivers within the healthcare systems (HCS) that serve them.
Over five million Americans are living with AD/ADRD. PLWD are particularly vulnerable to receiving uncoordinated and poor quality care, ultimately leading to adverse health outcomes, poor quality of life, and misuse of resources. Strategies to improve their care must be informed by high-quality evidence. While prior research has elucidated opportunities for improvement, the adoption of promising interventions has been stymied by the lack of research evaluating their effectiveness when implemented under “real-world” conditions.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Science of Behavior Change (SOBC) Common Fund Program was established in 2009 to capitalize on emerging basic behavioral science research and existing evidence-based interventions to improve the initiation, personalization, and maintenance of behavior change to optimize health. With involvement from 17 NIH Institutes, Centers, and Offices, the SOBC Program has sought to accelerate the investigation of common mechanisms of behavior change that cut across a broad range of health behaviors. The primary goals for the SOBC Common Fund Program include: (1) unifying the science of behavior change through a focus on mechanisms of behavior change and by strengthening links between basic and applied behavioral science; (2) strengthening behavioral intervention development by implementing the experimental medicine approach to behavior change research and developing the tools required to implement such an approach; and (3) increasing rigor, transparency, and dissemination of common terminology, methods, and measures to advance the field of behavior change research.